Pacific Gateways: Trans-Oceanic Anglophone Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century

The introduction surveys recent scholarship on the Pacific in English Literature during the long nineteenth century. It develops a theoretical approach focusing on the concept of the “gateway”: a point of access produced by Western technological networks, including steamship routes, the telegraph lines, the printing press, and the webs of international finance. It asks three main questions: how Europeans mentally mapped the Pacific region; how their encounters with it were informed by imperial technology and local networks; and how people in the Pacific region adapted these new gateways. Pacific encounters have often been theorized in terms of the “contact zone”, Mary Louise Pratt’s still-influential concept of the littoral or liminal moments in which cultures meet and struggle in unequal relations of power. In shifting the focus in this volume to the “gateway”, an idea which connotes the intersection of point of arrival with technological network, we hope to illuminate the ways in which encounters with the Pacific are framed by, and connected to, imperial technologies and infrastructure.